Beanstalk Raises $2 Million in VC Funding

Press Release

July 28, 2014

Salt Lake City – Beanstalk, an online SaaS-based tax platform for small-to-medium sized businesses and their advisors, raised $2 million in seed funding led by venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates (NEA), with participation from EPIC Ventures, Deep Fork Capital, and former Wall Street executive and investor Jim Engebretsen. Beanstalk will use the funds to continue building its core tax technology and fund its substantial growth in 2014 and beyond.

Beanstalk is a platform that provides secure document storage, date tracking, and note and discussion archives. Founder and CEO Kurt Avarell, a former tax, experienced first-hand the problems with complicated and less effective tax software options.

"Beanstalk is about making taxes really simple for small business owners and their advisors," said Avarell. "We are fundamentally rethinking how taxes work and how small businesses interact with their tax advisors."

Beanstalk targets a massive market that is currently filled with inefficiencies. Nearly 23 million small business owners across the United States spend as much as three weeks each year preparing, managing, and paying federal and state taxes. This is a costly tax burden in both time and expense for small business owners -- who would prefer to spend less time managing their taxes and more time building their business.

“Small business tax prep is a $6 billion market that is eager for disruption,” said Chetan Puttagunta, partner at NEA. “Beanstalk provides an extensive aggregate of tools for client management that benefit both tax pros and small business owners.”